ID :
140807
Sun, 09/05/2010 - 13:03
Auther :
Shortlink :
https://www.oananews.org//node/140807
The shortlink copeid
Remembrance service to held near St Pete for victims of 1920`s purges.
St PETERSBURG, September 5 (Itar-Tass) - A remembrance service is due
to be held at the Rzhevka artillery firing range near St Petersburg Sunday
in memory of victims of the amassed political repressions known as the Red
Terror, which swept Soviet Russia from 1918 through 1920.
Parishioners of Russian Orthodox churches in St Petersburg will gather
near the Cross of Obeisance in an open-air collective prayer.
Remembrance services timed for September 5, the day on which the
Council of People's Commissars of Soviet Russia issued a resolution 'On
the Red Terror', have been held for a number of years. This time, the
service will be led by the Reverend Georgy Mitrofanov, a professor of the
St Petersburg Theological Academy.
"Our goal is to feel ashamed and grievous over the things that
happened in this country," he said in an interview with Itar-Tass. "If
this happens in the small world around us, in our families and among the
people close to us, then we'll be able to try and start building a
different country."
According to the Reverend Mitrofanov, he meant a country of the type
"that the people executed on the Rzhevka firing range were symbols of."
Several thousand people taken hostage by revolutionary soldiers and
security forces from 1918 through 1920 were executed on the range. The
peaks of these repressions coincided with the offensive of the troops led
by Czarist General Yudenich on Petrograd, the uprising of naval men on the
Baltic Sea naval base in Kronstadt and the decree on confiscation of
Church valuables.
The trenches for the victims, which were hastily dug by the
executioners, became the final resting place for Metropolitan Benjamin of
Petrograd and the clerics slain together with him.
Also buried there is the decadence-era poet Nikolai Gumilyov, a
husband of the famous Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova.
The exact number of the people executed at the Rhevka firing range
back then is not exactly known even now and the facility still does not
have the legal status that would make amassed excavations possible there.
The data available to date enables the historians to speak of 7,500 or
so people killed at the firing range but experts of the Memorial human
rights association who did research in the archives of Russia's State
Security Service FSB claim the more exact figure should be 27,000.
to be held at the Rzhevka artillery firing range near St Petersburg Sunday
in memory of victims of the amassed political repressions known as the Red
Terror, which swept Soviet Russia from 1918 through 1920.
Parishioners of Russian Orthodox churches in St Petersburg will gather
near the Cross of Obeisance in an open-air collective prayer.
Remembrance services timed for September 5, the day on which the
Council of People's Commissars of Soviet Russia issued a resolution 'On
the Red Terror', have been held for a number of years. This time, the
service will be led by the Reverend Georgy Mitrofanov, a professor of the
St Petersburg Theological Academy.
"Our goal is to feel ashamed and grievous over the things that
happened in this country," he said in an interview with Itar-Tass. "If
this happens in the small world around us, in our families and among the
people close to us, then we'll be able to try and start building a
different country."
According to the Reverend Mitrofanov, he meant a country of the type
"that the people executed on the Rzhevka firing range were symbols of."
Several thousand people taken hostage by revolutionary soldiers and
security forces from 1918 through 1920 were executed on the range. The
peaks of these repressions coincided with the offensive of the troops led
by Czarist General Yudenich on Petrograd, the uprising of naval men on the
Baltic Sea naval base in Kronstadt and the decree on confiscation of
Church valuables.
The trenches for the victims, which were hastily dug by the
executioners, became the final resting place for Metropolitan Benjamin of
Petrograd and the clerics slain together with him.
Also buried there is the decadence-era poet Nikolai Gumilyov, a
husband of the famous Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova.
The exact number of the people executed at the Rhevka firing range
back then is not exactly known even now and the facility still does not
have the legal status that would make amassed excavations possible there.
The data available to date enables the historians to speak of 7,500 or
so people killed at the firing range but experts of the Memorial human
rights association who did research in the archives of Russia's State
Security Service FSB claim the more exact figure should be 27,000.
